Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @08:50PM
from the but-our-cheese-consumption-is-tough-to-beat dept.

New submitter Norwell Bob sends this excerpt from an Associated Press report:
"It's long been known that America's school kids haven't measured well compared with international peers. Now, there's a new twist: Adults don't either. In math, reading and problem-solving using technology – all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength – American adults scored below the international average on a global test, according to results (PDF) released Tuesday."

Orangutans have a larger brain than us, and all they do is spend all day swinging around in trees, eating fresh fruit and having sex while we build cities, invent gods so we can torture ourselves with guilt, and go to war over sticky black goo in the ground.

I think you're overestimating the orangutan brain size. It gets worse if you try to correct for body size using the encephalization quotient. You then get 7.4-7.8 for humans and 1.8 or so for orangutans.

From the very article you quote, the links between race and crime are the now discredited theories of the late 19th and early 20th century. That minority races are disproportionally represented in nearly every area of your criminal system is likely due to their similar distribution amongst the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum reinforced by racial stereotyping such as you are exhibiting.

That's right, I'm saying that you and the grand parent you are responding to are part of the problem.

It is not that you have a black race (whatever the hell that means) crime problem - you have a crime problem because you have too great a difference between the haves and have-nots, too many have-nots and an uneven distribution of 'race' across that have/have-not divide.

Yes, you could demand that 'they' lift their game and stop reacting to their poverty and discrimination by choosing to be obedient and productive members of the society that has historically exploited them and currently discriminates against them, or we could demand better behaviour of those with the resources.

So, you are correct, there are more 'blacks' arrested, more imprisoned and they are over-represented in other areas of the crime. To an extent, that's because they are black. But that's not racial or genetic. That's social and cultural. Your society and your culture. How about you start holding up your end before you start demanding that 'they' hold up theirs?

The fact that you think that everyone has equal access to all choices is an indication of the sort of background you come from. Absent your access to education, raised in a home environment and/or neighbourhood with less opportunities and your choices become much more limited, no matter how you capitalise them.

Your reasoning is nothing more than a lame rationalization

I have echoed the proposals of those far more expert in this matter than either of us, if you can fault their reasoning, please do so. Name calling doesn't further your argument.

an example of your own moral decay

Well, you're either a troll trying to get a rise by insulting me, or I've struck too close to home and have stung you.

could justify violent crime

I didn't attempt to justify it; I was pointing out the flaw in your attempt to explain its origin and further, suggesting that if you want it to change, then demanding that those who are less able be the ones to bear the burden of change is both unlikely to yield results and perpetuates the very discrimination that has resulted in the problem.

A disparity in wealth doesn't cause crime

Actually it does - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Crime [wikipedia.org]. Please don't try to weasel out with a pedantic argument over 'cause'. Yes, every person has free will, is captain of their destiny etc., but when talking about culture and society it is useful and meaningful to look at trends and forces at a level other than individual.

Also, the evolutions of crime rates don't follow the evolutions of the racial proportions of the population. Crime is going up or down, and the percentage of blacks isn't going up or down at the same time or even moving in the same direction most of the time. This further disproves correlation between the two, disproving causation as well.

what's more likely. people with higher melanin levels are more violent, or laws written
by the majority population are biased against the minority population.

Do you really think laws against violent crime are biased against the minority population? Really?

How about an alternate explanation, people growing up in inner city poverty are more violent. Once they break the cultural cycle of violence, we see that skin color doesn't matter. It's culture, not melanin.

So close.
The statistical correlation actually points to poverty as the main cause of crime. Obviously only those crimes that the trolls accuse certain minorities of. Things like serious fraud, war crimes, treason and perjury are not so well correlated to poverty.

Only about 10% of that 57% voted when it counted in the primaries because that's when the elections are stacked against the electorate, ensuring the majority will always be corporate flunkies. I seem to remember Obama managed to loose primaries to none of the above.

The No Child Left Behind became a No Adult Left Behind. YAPF - Yet another policy failure, since policies don't actually accomplish anything. You need teachers that can teach the old fashioned way to accomplish something.

You need teachers that can teach the old fashioned way to accomplish something.

Old fashion or new fashion, teachers' teaching styles are not the problem. The problem is that while they still teach facts, the often discourage actually thinking. The incessant attacks by both parties upon the idea that children can think are making it so that by the time they are out of school, they can't think.

Twenty years ago the idea that having an obviously-fake gun in school [washingtonpost.com] would get you in trouble, let alone kicked out or arrested, would be considered completely ludicrous. Be it anti-gun, anti-evolution, anti-whatever, schools have shifted their focus from teaching kids critical thinking and teaching them to question the world around them. Now they teach toeing the line, doing what they're told, and never questioning authority. Zero-tolerance policies are at the apex of this trend; it institutionalizes the concept of not thinking when a situation comes up, but instead doing exactly what you have been told to do. When you tell children that even teachers and school administrators are not allowed to use their judgment, why would kids ever think they should? Add to this the terror-inducing effects of zero-tolerance policies (i.e. "If someone would use a nerf gun, they'd probably also shoot you with a real one!"), and you reinforce the idea that you need to be terrified of everything, and trying to use your own judgment is a bad idea.

You want to improve things, it's not by going back to old teaching methods, it's by allowing teachers to teach thinking again and not by forcing them to be pawns in the organized "sheltering of young minds" that the administrations seem to be all too happy to go along with.

You want to improve things, it's not by going back to old teaching methods, it's by allowing teachers to teach thinking again and not by forcing them to be pawns in the organized "sheltering of young minds" that the administrations seem to be all too happy to go along with.

If there's one thing I've learned from the political narrative in the US, it is that teachers are government employees, too incompetent to tie their own shoes, let alone develop a curriculum and shape young minds. The only people we should trust with such sensitive tasks are the elected members of school boards, and possibly Congress. After all, those people are accountable to the voters, so they're guaranteed to have the people's best interest in mind. Teachers are only accountable to their unions, and we know that "union" is a euphemism for organized crime.

No, the way to fix our schools is to standardize on one message. In fact, technology allows us very easily to deliver exactly the same content to everyone. My proposal is that we contract K-12 education out to one of the existing MOOC companies and replace all those overpaid "teachers" with an iPad and a room monitor. We could even improve the security of our precious children by training the room monitors in appropriate defensive skills. Or even arming them. Nothing says "education" like a room full of kids being forced at gunpoint to watch indoctrination videos six hours a day. Brought to you by EduKart.

Take a look at the countries with better education rates then the US. A lot of them have political systems that are more socialized (education, health, etc) then the US.

If you want to solve problems you need to stop throwing idiology at each other and start thinking.

My (US born) wife and I were discussing last night. The word "unamercian" is thrown out a lot on conversations about these things. We live in Canada, and can't recall hearing the phrase "uncanadian", as in, it sounds odd to our ears, feels weird to say.

It's sad that there is a word in the lexicon in a country settled by immigrants and which claims to espouse the ideals of equality which means "You don't belong with us".

Now back to the topic,

If there's one thing I've learned from the political narrative in the US, it is that teachers are government employees, too incompetent to tie their own shoes

Canadian schools are publicly funded, 94.4% of children here are enrolled in public schools (vs private). The US has 90% enrollment in public as opposed to private schools (data taken from statistics Canada and US Institute of Educational Sciences - the latter via google cache due to govt shutdown).

This suggests to me, given Canada's ranking above the US on every survey category mentioned that the "government is too involved in education" answer is at least not the sole deciding factor in the relative rankings.

There is a "culture" and almost a celebration of being "stupid" in the popular media favoring the jocks, drugs/gangster "lifestyles" over being "smart" in the "West". I guess expensive post secondary schools (i.e. "colleges" for Americans) doesn't help either.

The rest of the world that placed a higher value on education (and less on sports) is scoring better. Is that a coincidence?

It could indeed be that the tests are flawed. So they're showing that Americans aren't particularly good at math, yet by and large we succeed well beyond everybody else in most respects. Especially given that we design most of the technology that the rest of the world uses (even manufacture most of it as well - though assembly is another matter,) which in itself necessitates mathematics as well as physics. So who are the ones ultimately doing poorly in all of this?

So they're showing that Americans aren't particularly good at math, yet by and large we succeed well beyond everybody else in most respects. Especially given that we design most of the technology that the rest of the world uses (even manufacture most of it as well - though assembly is another matter,) which in itself necessitates mathematics as well as physics. So who are the ones ultimately doing poorly in all of this?

Most Americans scored poorly on the tests; those same Americans aren't the ones who designs all that technology. America's engineers are a tiny subset of the population, and most likely scored quite well on the test. The vast majority of Americans don't work as engineers or scientists or anything of the sort, they work in service jobs.

I went to the US to do my post-doctorate. What I saw there sickened me - I saw hobos fighting (!) for prime begging spots. I saw people who were injured but afraid to call an ambulance because they couldn't afford it. The food was disgustingly full of sugar and the streets weren't safe after dark. And this was in the North East!

My American friends didn't believe me at first when I told them I didn't want to stay and wasn't applying for a green card. They couldn't imagine that anywhere else on Earth could be better. I got the hell out of there and back to civilisation and never looked back.

Not a troll. My great grandfather was killed by having a spleen burst in a fight for a prime spot. He was a vegetable-cart salesman in Chicago.

He came home, said " tomorrow there'll be one less Greek in Illinois, went to bed, and died two (not one) days later.

My grandfather grew up fatherless.

But people can't imagine living in the Land of the free(*)(tm). My fellow Americans, Let me give you a clue. Any country that speaks of freedom hasn't got it, and any country that calls terrorism, tends to be run exclusively by terrorists. Terrorism means using terror as a tool to rule.

In 1940s-1960s the USA did well - lots of top German and other scientists. Later there was still some discipline, unity and other good stuff leftover from the war. This era you had the Manhattan Project, 747, Apollo project, Douglas Engelbart's Mother of all Demos. Plenty of great things done.

1970s onwards the USA had the petrodollar. Basically the US Gov could create money, transfer a fair bit to the citizens (directly or indirectly via large projects like the continuing interstate highway project) and everyone else around the world with US dollars gets relatively poorer. Repeat as necessary.

2000+ onwards the petrodollar started weakening. Some "rogue" countries started selling oil in Euros. The US Gov created money but arguably didn't help the citizens as much with it. Go look where the created money went instead.

Things may have been great in the past, but the future doesn't look so bright. Not going to change unless the voters change things. But the voters prefer to keep voting for evil or lesser evil, and then complain that they still get evil.

I can't see why that would be part of a dream. As far as I'm concerned, that's like saying that it's your dream to work hard at digging large holes in the ground with spoons; it's a truly useless endeavor. I say this because our education system has been awful for a very long time, and the work students do is 99% useless busywork that has no place in reality and does not facilitate understanding.

No, that is the conservative fantasy of what America was. You conveniently leave out in your talks of the "American Dream" about the 10s of millions of slaves who never had any such chance. Or the then subsequently-freed slaves who themselves and their progeny faced nearly another hundred years of segregation. Oh and lets not forget how women used to not have the right to vote, were paid less than 50 cents on the dollar that a man made, were routinely were denied admission to college, etc. That is also before we also get to the robber baron era where a couple of greedy people paid their workers shit wages, made them work 80+ hours a week and all in unsafe work environments while they got ultra-wealthy and stifled any and all competition against them. The "American Dream" you refer to was only available to the wealthy, white males for more nearly 200 of the first years of America's existence.

America represented economic freedom - you could own your own house and even your own business, beholden to no-one. Today half of us dream of punishing "those people" who live that way.

Speaking as a non-american that's not what I as your problem. The people who enjoyed that economic freedom created brilliant innovative companies that then decided that economic freedom did not work so well for their profit margins. Worse they found that it was actually a lot easier to smother new and upcoming competition with either lawyers and court cases or by getting laws changed via lobbying than it was to out compete and innovate new companies.

As a result of that you ended up with a lot of companies who are rich from past glories and now use that to just hold everyone at bay slowing down the pace of progress and innovation to a pace they feel comfortable with. Worse you get some companies - yes banks I'm looking at you - who seem to have completely forgotten their raison d'etre (which was to stabilize and grow the economy by providing valuable financial services) and just go for profit at any cost, no matter how destructive and damaging that is to the economy they are supposed to be serving.

So is it any wonder that people are starting to question whether "those people" should live that way? It's not that people have a problem with successful people making money through clever innovations that benefit society - the problem is that there are lots of people making money for doing nothing useful (or even harmful) to society.

And then the Rich 1% realized they could redistrict and elect more people like themselves and get everything even faster. They realized that in a global economy, they weren't happy just making money off the idiots in Dallas, they wanted to rob the idiots in Dubai as well.... So the sent all the jobs to Shanghai.. where there there's no intellectual property, environmental, or labor laws and they can pay sub livable wages to sell their shit to the Indians who will pay just above nothing while the former Americans who had all those jobs 30 years ago have nothing but welfare... so the rich need to cut that too... Since they have their own security, private schools and doctors in tow, why the hell would they even dream of paying taxes to support the public versions of things they already have.... they wont.. welcome to the America 2.0.

According to a BBC article, the American Dream is upwards social mobility: that your children will be better educated and better off than you were. The point of the article [bbc.co.uk] was that downward social mobility is increasingly common in the US.

You must be an American, since you apparently hold the current Secretary of Education responsible for the quality of American public school education decades before he took office (or in some cases, before he graduated high school).

That's how the political machine works everywhere in the world, I'm afraid. At least, everywhere that the people think they have a say in matters....

In an ideal world, the question wouldn't be about figuring out who's culpable; it'd be about figuring out how to fix it. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world... people look to whoever is supposed to be able to fix it, and they blame them for not having fixed it already.

Isn't this just one of many signs of the decline of the American Empire? The American oligarchs used to look after their people back in the days when they built their empire but nowadays, the privileged grandchildren of the original oligarchs have forgotten where their wealth and power came from. And so on down the slippery slope...

Sure. The coal mining oligarchs were nice enough to set up company towns with company script for money, and would pay barely enough to live. And if you were sick your whole family would be on the street. They sure looked after their people. And while not every oligarch/family were like this, they all had the same attitude and would do it if they could. The good old days were not that good. The 1950's, 1960s, and 1970s were probably the best era in terms of what you are talking about, but even much of that was marred by civil rights abuses.

More whether or not you can socially function and whether you know the basics of using a computer.

Plumbing, paving roads, being a cashier, managing people, checking meter readings, working an assembly line don't involve much math or English.

Perhaps society only needs a few people per hundred that are great at math? People don't need math skills to drive a semi-truck or make the donuts or take an order or stock a warehouse.... Similar to how most companies only need a few elite coders?

Most jobs don't involve a lot of math or english these days.
More whether or not you can socially function and whether you know the basics of using a computer.
Plumbing, paving roads, being a cashier, managing people, checking meter readings, working an assembly line don't involve much math or English.
Perhaps society only needs a few people per hundred that are great at math? People don't need math skills to drive a semi-truck or make the donuts or take an order or stock a warehouse.... Similar to how most companies only need a few elite coders?

Historically education (especially higher education) was not for the purpose of job training. That was handled by other means such as apprenticeships. Education was for the purpose of personal enrichment and quality of life.

A nation of people who can effectively work their corporate jobs but believe everything the TV tells them will create a fascist dictatorship. In the USA it will probably be a "soft tyranny" of the "we know what's best for you, or else" type, not the "strong man with an iron fist" dictatorships we've seen in the past.

Perhaps society only needs a few people per hundred that are great at math?

In fact, the richest and most powerful Americans would probably like there to be not so many people who understand math: Those who understand math can understand how badly they're being screwed by the richest and most powerful Americans!

Those who understand math can understand how badly they're being screwed

I'll let Carlin get this one:

They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this fuckin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club....The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice....And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.

It would have helped if many of those people whose homes were foreclosed during the housing crisis had basic math skills. . .

More importantly, math is an exercise in logic. A population filled with people who can't effectively utilize logic can turn pretty ugly when the government is representative/democratic. Just because Joe the Plumber has the skills necessary to be a plumber doesn't mean that his inability to construct a logical argument won't be detrimental to society. A person is more than their job and their value to society ought to be measured by something greater.

It would have helped if many of those people whose homes were foreclosed during the housing crisis had basic math skills. ..

Does the same apply to people who were paid millions to play with CDO's, CDS's, and all those other wonderful financial instruments that were part of the housing bubble? Or do you not need math skills if you know that you're going to be bailed out no matter how badly you screwed up?

math is an exercise in logic. A population filled with people who can't effectively utilize logic

Speaking of logic, it doesn't follow that people who are bad at the logic used in math, are necessarily bad at other types of logic. Such assumptions can lead to a false sense of superiority though.

How dumb is it to have the bank offer you a loan so you can afford to live in a house you couldn't afford? These people were mostly former renters. That's their frame of reference. The banker, knowing full well the situation and the buyer's mindset, explains, "You will have fixed mortgage payments of $600/mo for 3 years and then depending on interest rates, it can go up or down." The buyer hears, "I will have fixed rent payments of $800/mo for 3 years and then the rent will go up (because it never goes down)." He compares the house he's being offered with what he can rent for that amount and decides the house is a better deal -- because it is. He makes a possibly rational decision that even if he's foreclosed on, he's way ahead taking that mortgage over the $1200/mo mortgage with traditional financing -- $14400 over that three years. He's a RENTER. He was figuring to move every 3 years anyway.

So what? What did he lose when he stopped making payments after they ballooned to $1200? Nothing. The loan company didn't lose anything either; they MADE money on the fees that they rolled into the note. It's the "smart" people who bought the mortgage-backed securities that the bank fraudulently sold to them as AAA that lost money. They are checking their math over and over and it doesn't add up. They should have studied harder.

Ha! You mean to tell me that all those kids who 10-20 years ago were getting a shit education grew up to be adults that don't know shit? Say it isn't so! Next thing you'll tell me is that correlation isn't causation and there is some bigger root cause we just haven't figured out yet.

Ha! You mean to tell me that all those kids who 10-20 years ago were getting a shit education grew up to be adults that don't know shit? Say it isn't so! Next thing you'll tell me is that correlation isn't causation and there is some bigger root cause we just haven't figured out yet.

And why would a common man need those skills in modern USA? Cash registers do all the math for a worker; there is nothing to read and no particular reason to bother, with TV in every room; and the only problem that needs to be solved is how to pay all the bills.

Those skills are indeed essential - but only if you are innovating, inventing, doing new stuff. However how many US workers can proudly say that they do such things? The US economy is known to be a "service economy" - and those jobs are static, frozen in time, requiring no R&D.

But if you work for a startup in a significant role, chances are good that you are smart and inventive. You may even read books now and then.

Oddly enough, success in today's economy (or any other day's for that matter) doesn't depend very strongly on how well you perform on a multiple choice test. The U.S. has been scoring poorly relative to other countries for decades now, and continues to be the world leader in innovation and productivity. It is no coincidence that Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc., etc. are all American companies, or that the Internet was created in America, not to mention the personal computer, integrated circuits and transistors. Or GPS, or air travel, or (going back a bit) the light bulb and audio recording. Most of the things that make the world the way it is today come from America. And yet we keep scoring worse than the Finns on multiple choice international math tests. I don't think I'll lose any sleep over it.

The U.S. has been scoring poorly relative to other countries for decades now, and continues to be the world leader in innovation and productivity

Imagine what we, as a nation, could achieve if we were well educated.

Probably about the same as other better educated countries. Americans are not genetically superior beings, nor is our country specially blessed by any deity. One of the reasons we don't score as well as some other countries is because we don't spend as much time in school. Very few other countries have two month summer vacations, for instance. And, at least for me, summer vacation was the time I was most creative and had the most active imagination. I believe those qualities are essential for innovation. (Remember, Thomas Edison had only three weeks of formal schooling.) Chinese students, on the other hand, spend almost every waking moment in school or doing school work. And although they score very well on international tests, employers frequently complain they don't think outside the box, or innovate as well as their American counterparts.

The US' average education has been going downhill steadily in the last two decades or so. Post-high-school education is becoming damn near unaffordable to all but the wealthy, and even basic "participate in the world" type skills are getting worse.

Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc., etc. are all American companies

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had upper-class parents. Zuckerberg was able to afford going to Harvard, Brin was born in Russia and Page was the son to a famous computer scientist. All you're showing right now is that the upper echelons of American society are going to be fine, and 1st generation immigrants are doing well too.

the Internet was created in America, not to mention the personal computer, integrated circuits and transistors. Or GPS, or air travel, or (going back a bit) the light bulb and audio recording.

All of which happened at least 40 years ago.

Most of the things that make the world the way it is today come from America.

Not really. Most of what makes the world what it is today came from somewhere else. Paper, rockets, computing and sewers came from somewhere else. We've had a brief supremacy spell after WW2 until about the early nineties. After that, it's been steadily downhill. We're still ahead of everyone else, but this is exactly like a racer thinking he's going to win a race after losing a wheel: he might still be ahead now, but that's not going to last very long.

And I see this type of short-sighted - actually, less than short-sighted; it is nothing but a snapshot analysis - far too often from Americans. Gloating that their GDP is still tops, that their per capita income is still tops, that they still dominate certain industries... without realizing that the gap is shrinking fast, and that the fundamentals are all wrong.

(Through the eyes of your average American)America - Totally Normal, just slightly lacking on education...Japan - Weird People, Known for Sushi, Nuclear incidents and Cosplay girlsFinland - Freaks, Known for Insane Death Metal Bands and Rally driversCanada - Canadians, Known for not being AmericaNetherlands - Druggies, Known for being full of pot smokersAustralia - Weird People, Known for all being criminals and bush rangersSweden - More Weird People, Known for tall blonde women, word's ending in "ooorgan" and "ski", and families who shower togetherNorway - Must be Weird, Known for very little... I think it snows thereFlanders-Belgium - Freaks, make chocolate and not get fatCzech Republic - Fucking Freaks, Known for street porn and getting mugged when travellingSlovak Republic - Nutters, just look at Slovakia on a map, it's worse than cz..Korea - Freaks, Known for having a north and south, wait Korea? do they have electricity there yet?

BTW, I am from Australia - clearly, the more crazy and fucked up your nation is, the smarter it's population is.

The curious thing about this is that the US leads the world in high technology companies in many areas.

Perhaps average adult scores don't matter that much. The distributions might be more important. Perhaps in the US there are enough really smart people to create Unix, C, SQL and many other things.

Also, for the record, I'm a non-American who has lived in the US and Europe. It's fascinating that to an outsider the US doesn't appear to have a surplus of intelligence and yet dominates in IT and many other scientific fields.

I see this as one of the many negative emergent properties of MBA bottom line thinking. You get thinking that thinks that if you keep training an employee in general ways you will end up with your employee leaving and all your training then was to the benefit of another company. Whereas if your employees are under-qualified they will be terrorized into working as hard as they can every day for slave wages.

Another effect of this short term thinking can be seen in most universities. If you invest in a top notch football coach and lavish training and whatnot on the team then you will have near instant wins that you can take to the board of directors. But if you invest in STEM and buy the physics department a pile of cool stuff then maybe, just maybe you will have one of your people win a Nobel prize 30 years from now. Some universities have realized that having really smart students and encouraging them to do cool things can result in near instant wins (Stanford, MIT) but few universities are willing to play the long game (Harvard and Yale seem to be which is funny as they churn out the short term mentality MBAs).

So if you go to a university and want to cure cancer you might have an intellectually interesting time but I am willing to bet that the waterboy for the football team is having more fun. Then on top of that you have the post school job market situation. Again the waterboy will have better job prospects in sales with his BA in sociology than a PhD in Physics ever will. But the MBA or even BA in Business will blow everyone out of the water. Even the PhD who wants the bucks is well advised to jump into something like HFT.

In the past we used terms like rocket scientist and had idols like Einstein and Feynman. But now the best we can do are a few pop culture TV scientists. There is no moon program, there is no nuclear program, there are no blackbird cool skunkworks capturing the public imagination. But there are sports stars, there are hedge-funds, and their are actors and that is about it.

Being a nerd has never been the coolest thing in the world but right now it might be at its lowest ebb.

But back to bashing MBAs. I have been to many companies when I was doing consulting. Fewer and fewer companies are allowing their employees much room for original thought. I have met truck drivers who weren't allowed to change a brake light. I have met IT people who ran a local office yet weren't allowed to deal with the tsunami of malware infecting all the machines because that was not their job. These are systems that were rigidly designed in some central office for maximum "efficiency" that are obviously total BS. You won't get a job in that central office by being an awesome IT person; but if you get an EMBA then you are suddenly VP material.

If you watch the show Undercover Boss the theme is almost always the same. The top boss is surrounded by MBAs who have completely insulated him from the rest of the company. So by going out into the trenches he discovers that the primary effect of the Managerial Accounting that is thrown at him is that the halfwits at the very bottom of the company know that it is being badly run. Yet the reports he gets indicate that things are running at nearly 100% efficiency.

So in this culture of only thinking about next weeks metrics how could someone ever think that embarking on a life long learning endevour would result in progress. Instead a culture of us vs them is created resulting in people reveling in their non-sophistication. If anything self-betterment would be a betrayal of your tribe.

I bring this up because Finland has been mentioned many times over the last few weeks in various regards to education. Some have pointed to it as great with education because of these scores or because the teachers are better or other things along that line. However all the speakers who say this seem to miss an important point that I had seen discussed in a Finnish magazine.

And that is the issue of television and movies in Finland are all subtitled, and never dubbed. It seems minor but it's a huge incentive to learn to read. You can not be illiterate in Finland and watch the popular television programs or movies from America. Even Baywatch is subtitled in Finnish and Swedish. Not only do you have to read you have to read at a reasonable speed to keep up. So as a student if the rest of the children are talking about going to see Iron Man 3 and you can't read very well you now have an reason to work much harder.

What was interesting in the article is that they compared Finland to Germany. Socially the two countries are reasonably similar with roughly similar types of educational systems. However German television and movies are all dubbed, which was pointed out as one possible reason for the large disparity in reading and literacy. From this current report for age 16-65 it shows Finland at number 2, with German below the average and only one step above the United States.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting idea. At the very least I think all the effort to figure out what they're doing different in schools from our schools won't cover the whole picture. Naturally, good reading skills improve performance in other subjects like mathematics.

From the current report listed I note another interesting pattern on page 63, figure 2.1 which is a list of literacy rates (only highly literate nations, it wasn't a survey of all countries). The literacy rates are 1 to 5. The divide between level 2 and 3 was the center of the chart. For most of the countries, including the US, the percentage at level 3 is roughly the same at 40%, with only a couple countries exceeding that. The percentage of people at level 3 seems roughly the same for most countries listed. The differences seem that the higher countries have more people at the advanced literacy levels and fewer at who are below basic levels. I think Finland and Japan here may do well at low end of the scale because overall they have a relatively smaller number of immigrants and transient workers.

People generally forget what they've learned unless they use the knowledge within a few months or so.

You mean, Americans forget what they've learnt unless they use the knowledge within a few months or so. We are talking about the general level of education here, in math, reading, and problem-solving skills.

Americans are work-aholics relatively speaking and thus will bury their head in their here-and-now work such that distant knowledge fades quickly as the immediate situation takes over.

If the here-and-now work does not involve math, reading, or problem-solving skills, it would appear that the work that Americans do could reasonably delegated to monkeys. Or, one step up, unlearnt workers in developing countries. Of course, that's exactly where the jobs go because Americans demand far too much pay for their low-skilled work. Nobody wants to pay the premium for "made in U.S.A." and so the U.S. has assembled the largest trade deficit of any country in history.

A Just-In-Time education system may be a better approach than trying to hammer in concepts while young hoping they are hammered in deep enough to stay in. That's perhaps not a rational use of time. The 4-year university approach is obsolete, or at least needs big-time augmentation.

If you want to compete with an uneducated working class, you'll have to adapt your standards of living. That you haven't done so, shows in the trade deficit. In contrast to Americans, developing countries understand that improving their living standards requires education. A university education is still actually one of the few American products that sells reasonably well abroad (well, not all coursework that ventures to call itself "education", obviously). Of course, once the "just-in-time education" proponents have driven the American education to third-world level and below, this rather expensive product line will be eradicated from the trade balance as well.

They both teach you how to get the most out of a set of tools, but formal education concentrates on the tool that is your brain -- how to think, how to organize information, how to accommodate new ideas and facts. How to use your brain.

JIT training is commonly known as on-the-job-training, and is not a new idea. But it works best when the student is already educated.

One of the aspect of this test, as far as I understood, is reading comprehension. If that fails, everything else fails, because any other training -- programming included -- requires reading.There is a surprisingly high share of adults who can not comprehend a text they read (a skill, ironically, often practized in math classes).

The classical education (what you're describing) is dead. What we have now is the standardized test education. Reasons vary, depending on your level of paranoia - standardised testing is easier to quantify, the rulers don't want their workers to learn how to think, etc.

"The classical education (what you're describing) is dead," for the 99% But I can assure you that elite private schools in NY and LA DON'T focus on standardized testsI guess the rulers do want their children to think (and take over).

After spending a decade as an educator, I can confidently state that very few people can apply concepts that they have just learned. However, many people will be able to apply those concepts when they revisit them. That seems to be true even if they forgot what they originally learned.

That experience leads me to believe that JIT education simply would not work in practice, even though it sounds great. The demand for a traditional education, even for jobs that didn't require an education in the past, leads me to believe that employers know that JIT education (i.e. on the job training) is a risky investment at best and that they may even see it as ineffective.

Then as an educator you should know what the real problem is. It breaks down to 3:

1. Localized school boards more interested in political gains than education. They are busy trying to maintain their kingdoms that they have built and trying to expand it.That leads to differing results from community to community.

2. Changes in laws such as No Child Left Behind (an Orwellian title if ever there was one) mandating that teacher retention be tied to student performance has made it necessary for self preservation for teachers to teach to the tests. Add in dwindling budgets and anything not directly related to those tests gets cut from the curriculum. Many primary schools have dropped music, art and classics from their teaching programs all together.

3. Lack of parental involvement in their children's education. This may be one of the most important reasons that education is failing in the US. With both parents needing to work just to make ends meet because the average income level has declined while costs have increased, it makes it difficult for parents to spend the proper amount of time with their kids education.

Until these issues are addressed, we will continue to see a decline in education in the US.

As a society, the US does not value education. Sure, when asked we do. But in reality, we don't. IF we did then nothing else would matter, we'd go to public libraries and educate ourselves if the education system was failing us. But we don't. The majority of kids in the US treat School like a mandatory prison sentence.

Kids that want a good education can get the worlds best right here in the US. People send their children to the US from all over to get a High School and College Education here. sad fact is most of our society doesn't want the great resources and opportunities that are right here for them. No law, teaching method, etc. is going to change that.

Bwahahaha, I guess you are modded insightful because it is the new funny? I actually lol-ed a little at your comment. Compared to many areas in Europe, yes, but compared to many of the better scoring nations, and especially the #1 scorer, Japan, which is well known for work-a-haulism (among other -ahaulisms), Americans definitely are not work-ahaulics.

A Just-In-Time education system may be a better approach... 4-year university approach is obsolete

It may be, but the nations that beat the US haven't thrown out the traditional approaches to education. Again, Japan, which I would think would be the poster

Bwahahaha, I guess you are modded insightful because it is the new funny? I actually lol-ed a little at your comment. Compared to many areas in Europe, yes, but compared to many of the better scoring nations, and especially the #1 scorer, Japan, which is well known for work-a-haulism (among other -ahaulisms), Americans definitely are not work-ahaulics.

Actually, the average America works more hours per year than the average Japanese by about ~40 hours. The times vary from year to year. Last year (2012) it was 45 hours, but in 2011, it was over 60. Go see for yourself:

As for education, I do have to agree with you for education up to and including high school education. The current system in the USA is completely broken, which isn't surprising as it was designed in the 1800's, not the 21st century. It is still based on concepts and criteria to produce factory line workers and farmers, not critical thinkers, engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, or artists. Even the very concept of the "school year" itself is based on 1800's agricultural needs of the children to be home working on the farm planting/harvesting crops, which is why there exists such a thing as "summer vacation". More is lost in the 2-3 months of "summer vacation" than is taught in 2 months of classes (more for students of low income families). That actually means that in terms of education knowledge gained, our students only have 5-6 months of school while countries that do not have a 2-3 month summer vacation received 10-11 months in the same time period. It is no wonder our students do not do as well....

Even the very concept of the "school year" itself is based on 1800's agricultural needs of the children to be home working on the farm planting/harvesting crops, which is why there exists such a thing as "summer vacation".

No, the busiest times on a farm are planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. Back when kids had lots of work to do on the family farm, that's when school breaks were. The traditional summer vacation is an early 20th century invention from the cities.

Stop. Please, just stop. You don't call slaves "workaholics". We aren't the smiling factory workers depicted in your imaginary propaganda world, happily clocking in unlimited overtime because we're filled with patriotic pride. We do it because we have no labor party. There are no unions. The top 1% in this country control over 40% of the wealth, and the top 10% control over 80%. We are a nation of slaves. We work, and we work, and then we drop dead. And until recently, we didn't even have health care. Arguably, we still don't -- Obamacare is such a poor substitute for true national health care I almost makes me cry. You have to pay for it; Which means it's squeezing the already failing middle class by forcing them to sign up for it. It exempts the poor, and the rich... well, they don't need it. So in the final analysis, our health care system, while a vast improvement over the previous one which suffered a total existance failure, is still just contributing to an already serious problem. It's the untold story you won't hear on Fox, or CNN, or NBC. You'll have to go somewhere like Al Jezerra or the BBC to pick up any trace of it.

You people who aren't from here act like it's all sunshine and daisies. That we ride around in tanks slurping down ginormous sodas and cheeseburgers, living it up. Everything about our culture is toxic. It will kill you, slowly. Living here is like smoking cigarettes -- it kills you one breath at a time. We're dealing with a nation of people who don't sleep enough, who are forced out of bed before the sun is up to go to work, and don't get back until it's back down again. Many of us work the weekends too, just to pay the bills. We're saddled with piles of debt, high taxes, and everything needs a credit check, even if you want to pay in cash. Our banks didn't just kill our economy -- they trigger a global, worldwide, recession. You think you felt the hurt? We were ground zero.

A Just-In-Time education system may be a better approach than trying to hammer in concepts while young hoping they are hammered in deep enough to stay in.

Your solution to severe and pervasive societal-level problems is to play buzzword bingo? Are you fucking kidding me? We don't need a "just in time" education system. We need any education system. Check out the high school graduation rates in all of our major cities -- they're falling like a rock. No Child Left Behind has become an unmitigated clusterfuck that punishes our best schools by defunding them. No, that's literally how it works, that isn't a typo. The law is written so that schools are funded based on the improvement in test scores from the previous year. Not from having high test scores and a great graduation rate -- those are signs of imminent school shutdown! We fund the worst schools because they're the easiest to bring test scores up, and we cut the best ones, because you can't improve anymore once you're in that top percentile.

The 4-year university approach is obsolete, or at least needs big-time augmentation.

It doesn't need augmentation; It was working just fine before. It needs to have all the profiteering assholes nailed to a cross and put out in the courtyards and left to be eaten by goddamned vultures to serve a warning to any rich bastard that would try to profit from the institutions that prepare our young adults for specialized work. These assholes singlehandedly killed any potential for an entire generation to escape poverty. These kids are sucking down $100,000 student loan debts. If current trends continue, they'll be in their 40s before they even make enough money to pay back the interest alone on that... let alone start getting at the principle.

No sir, no sir you are dead wrong about everything that's wrong with this country. The conservatives in this country have hated public education from day one -- that was an invent

The top 1% in this country control over 40% of the wealth, and the top 10% control over 80%. We are a nation of slaves.

The latter does not follow from the former. While I agree with your overall view of the US problem, you (the average american citizen) are not slaves because of how the wealth distributes across the population, but because the means to improve your own situation and do something about it have been locked away from you with your own support, through all kinds of excuses that range from patri

Americans definitely are workaholics, because they're consumerists. They work 60 hour weeks because they put useless junk on their credit cards and need to pay it off. They feel like a big house and the newest car is more important than their freedom, and take out huge loans for that. The median [not mean] household income is over $50K -- unless you have major uncovered health costs or a family of 10, the only reason to not cut back your hours on that income is that you're a workaholic/consumerist (or if yo

I'm gonna show this post to my girlfriend, who still sometimes thinks we should move to the states.

The experience of immigrants really depends on where they fall in the socioeconomic ladder. All of my immigrant friends are in their late 20s to mid 30s with IT careers, and are well into the top 5-10% of earners in the US. Without exception they say their life is better here than anyone they know back home.

I am sure there are plenty of immigrants you come here and fail though, and their experiences are not nearly as good. The unfortunate thing about the US is that it probably is the best place in the world

You forgot to mention that we will default this month. And while I can't tell you how people will recover from it, I'm fairly certain that the future of the United States of America will no longer be "united". Old Glory is about to get a change in star count sooner than we all think.

I'm fairly certain Texas will lose. Badly. Just like the last time they tried this. As did every other state that joined the Confederacy. But by all means, if they want round two, us Northerners are only too happy to mop the floor with them. Again. We'll probably be home in time for dinner... not much has changed since the last civil war: They got shit infrastructure, industry, no natural resources, and depend on welfare from the rest of the union. As I understand it... Alabama and Tennessee are now trading

Please stop. You have no idea what you're talking about. First, here [wikipedia.org] is the current list of Labor parties around the world. The democrats aren't on that list. Second, the democratic party platform is nothing like the labor party platform. Labor parties around the world typically prioritize issues directly relating to labor law, such as child labour, overtime pay, collective bargaining, and occupational safety. They strongly support unions and defend the right of anyone to strike. The democrats don't make any of these things a priority.

Someone has to pay for healthcare: a service rendered by these slaves you mentioned

Umm, unless 89% of the US population works in a hospital or in the medical profession, no. And most people in the medical profession are in just as bad a shape as the rest of us. The cost of putting yourself through medical school, then paying for medical malpractice insurance, leaves many in the industry only somewhat better off than people asking if you'd like fries with that. The problems I mentioned affect 90% or so of Americans. Doctors are part of that 90%.

It's not this free magic that would pour out of the ether if we'd only vote in more democrats. In fact, the costs wouldn't be so high if the government didn't [derp deleted] It's easy to spend other people's money [more derp]

3. Profit motive is no better or worse than any other. [long tea bagging derp omitted]

Nice strawman. Wealth inequity is due to greed; which is a lot more accurate word to describe how 1% of Americans compulsively hoarde wealth than "profit motive", which is a more flattering term for it.

. The last thing I'd want is the UN here, 'liberating' us from our constitution or

"The guv'munt is tryin' to steal mah guns!" The Tea Bag is strong with this one. The UN hasn't "liberated" anything, and nobody said this, you warped backwater conspiracy theorist. We need humanitarian aid for our poor because our lawmakers have become about as detached from reality as you are, and it's killing people. Literally. Right now. Nobody wants your fucking gun, or "the constitution", for whatever good that's doing all the people starving to death right now in places like New Orleans and Detroit. I'm pretty sure a loaf of bread is much more in demand than some whack-ass political ideology.

7. The media does lie, that is true. Guess which party they

Both. Next stupid question?

8. Wealth inequity is an expression of nature,[bullshit rationalization omitted]

No. Greed, gluttony, and sociopathy are not in any way normal. You know what's normal? People helping each other. People breaking bread with each other. People sharing. Because at our very core, the essence of what it means to be human, is that we are social creatures. Our default is to cooperate, not compete. E Pluribus Unum is not latin for "every man for himself". People like you yammer on about the Constitution, but you got not a fucking clue amongst the lot of you about what it actually means. What our founding fathers were trying to create.

Well, let me spell it out for you: The purpose of a democracy isn't to make wealth, or a great country, or a big military. The purpose of a democracy is to make great people. We need more Einsteins, more Martin Luther Kings, more George Washingtons, more Fredrick Douglasses. We don't need more Larry Ellisons, or the Kooches and Waltons, or Ralph Murdocks, etc., etc.

And that's what you idiot teabaggers will never comprehend, and what you're a blight upon the political landscape of this country, a veritable dog shit on the lawn of human decency and compassion. Your twisted logic leads to sociopathy and neuroticism. Thank you and good day, sir.

With the exception of public sector employees, where unionization is alive and kicking. The rest were pretty much done in with the wave of globalization that begin around 1990 and was accelerated by the Internet and vastly improved worldwide telecommunications bandwidth.

Sir, you need to get educated on the political realities of our age. "In 2010, the percentage of workers belonging to a union in the United States (or total labor union "density") was 11.4%, compared to 18.4% in Germany, 27.5% in Canada, and 70% in Finland.[1] Union membership in the private sector has fallen under 7% â" levels not seen since 1932." Source [wikipedia.org]

That's not winning. That's losing. That's losing badly.

That may be, but it's not like those 1 percent are

It doesn't matter who, what, where, or when they are. The fact is, 1% controls 40% of the wealth in this country. This is not a good thing! Economies function best with high liquidity, when trade is abundant, when money trades hands quickly. This doesn't happen when a few million people are hoarding cash to the point it probably passes a clinical threshold. The end! They could be the patron saint of charity, but it doesn't change the fact that the money isn't moving. It's not helping anyone but them. And while we're on the topic of charity, common sense demanding and answer to "If they're so generous, how come everyone else is so poor" notwithstanding, survey after survey [theatlantic.com] indicates the wealthy give far less to charity than the poor. Click the link, it explains one reason why that might be.

I completely disagree with that. Compared with Roman slaves, African-American slaves before the civil war, peasants who were indentured servants to feudal lords before the industrial revolution? Hell no. A slave is someone whose life is basically controlled by someone else, and who cannot escape even if they were willing to make financial sacrifices.

Yeah, small problem: While there were quite a few of those kinds of slaves, indentured servitude [wikipedia.org] has historically been more prevalant, and socially acceptable. Did you know it took the United States until 2000 to outlaw it? And while it's now on the books under human trafficing laws, tens of millions of Americans are functionally indentured servants. Anyone here on a work visa; If you're fired, you gotta go home. Anyone who has ever been chased by debt collectors is well aware that they can take everything down to the clothes on your back legally for any debt, and many states allow ex parte orders to invoke police authority to confinscate any and all personal property.

We change the definitions around, you know, paint smiles on the bags over people's heads... but we're still abusing the crap out of the poor in this country. They are functional slaves. They do not have very many options, if any. It's shit minimum wage jobs, paycheck to paycheck living, and having to decide between pills and food. We treat our prisoners better than our poor in this country. At least in prison you get three square meals and basic medical care. Until a week ago, the poor didn't get medical care outside of prison. They're still going hungry.

Well, so do most of the top 1 percent you're talking about,

You know, having a 20 mil a year income means you can take regular vacations. Work short weeks. Take time off to see the kids. You know what having a 20 thou a year income means? Busting your balls 40-70 hours a week. No vacation. No sick time. Maybe seeing your family through bleary eyes as you collapse in your own bed. When I say "working to death", I assumed you'd be smart enough to realize I was talking about the quality of a person's life, not the quanti

People generally forget what they've learned unless they use the knowledge within a few months or so. Americans are work-aholics relatively speaking and thus will bury their head in their here-and-now work such that distant knowledge fades quickly as the immediate situation takes over.

A Just-In-Time education system may be a better approach than trying to hammer in concepts while young hoping they are hammered in deep enough to stay in. That's perhaps not a rational use of time. The 4-year university approach is obsolete, or at least needs big-time augmentation.

Actually, the 4-year university approach is excellent. We should return to it. What is obsolete and never worked well is the job skill training that masquarades as the 4-year university approach. The purpose of college/university used to be to be educated in many subjects, to be well rounded, to be a critical thinker, etc. Today, it is to get a job.

Those are stories told to you by the media. The part they don't tell you is that they also get a lot more vacation than in the U.S. to the point that Americans actually work more hours per year than Japanese or Korean workers.

Joe and Jane American can't think critically. They can't form arguments. My own experience of trying to discuss politics or world affairs or just about anything with Americans tells me that conversation will inevitably come to a crashing halt at one of these two points:

"Because that's what the Bible says!"

"Go back to Berkeley, communist."

If you disagree, contradict, or attempt to educate an American on anything, the reaction is either "I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALA JESUS JESUS JESUS" or "FUCK YOU AND YOUR SOCIALISM".

I would argue that your fix for the education system is completely backwards. Teachers, while not earning rock-star salaries, are in the top half of all earners in every state in the Union. More education for teachers wouldn't solve the problem. Having a teacher with a masters degree is like having a McDonald's employee with 8 years of culinary school training. The extra training doesn't bring anything to the table. A person only needs to be about two levels ahead in a subject to be able to effectively